Mensa isn′t even the most exclusive intellectual society. It′s actually one of the least exclusive. You only need to be in the top 2%, which means that out of the ~300 million people in the USA, about six million would qualify. Big whoop.

The Four Sigma Society, for instance, requires that you be a minimum of four standard deviations to the right of the mean. And they′re not the most exclusive either.

Mensa ― where you have to be smart enough to score reasonably high on an I.Q. test, yet stupid enough to plunk down annual dues for little more than what basically amounts to bragging rights.

Since this is England and another girl from the same estate joined mensa, I have to wonder if the cafeteria at their school fries everything in green oil that's safe to eat, but deadly to any of the cafeteria staff who touch it.

COMALite J:Mensa ― where you have to be smart enough to score reasonably high on an I.Q. test, yet stupid enough to plunk down annual dues for little more than what basically amounts to bragging rights.

THIS. Got in at 16. Stopped paying dues at 18. Never gone back in 25+ years.

PaLarkin:Since this is England and another girl from the same estate joined mensa, I have to wonder if the cafeteria at their school fries everything in green oil that's safe to eat, but deadly to any of the cafeteria staff who touch it.

PaLarkin:Since this is England and another girl from the same estate joined mensa, I have to wonder if the cafeteria at their school fries everything in green oil that's safe to eat, but deadly to any of the cafeteria staff who touch it.

I'd be willing to bet a good chunk of change that this is the last the world hears of her.

My brother outscored me on IQ testing when we were kids. I'm a doctor; he's a barista. He's still unbelievably brilliant, and I'm certain that he is smarter than me, but brilliance does not equal motivation.

My parents were throwing a big Christmas party one year, invited lots of people and friends of friends and so on.One guy showed up at the door and asked, "Is this the Mensa meeting?"My parents thought he was joking and played along.

Poor guy didn't realize he was at the wrong place until much, much later in the evening.

clyph:COMALite J: Mensa ― where you have to be smart enough to score reasonably high on an I.Q. test, yet stupid enough to plunk down annual dues for little more than what basically amounts to bragging rights.

THIS. Got in at 16. Stopped paying dues at 18. Never gone back in 25+ years.

Never started. Seriously you have to pay to join a group to tell you that you are smrt? Doesn't sound very intelligent to me. *shrug*

clyph:COMALite J: Mensa ― where you have to be smart enough to score reasonably high on an I.Q. test, yet stupid enough to plunk down annual dues for little more than what basically amounts to bragging rights.

THIS. Got in at 16. Stopped paying dues at 18. Never gone back in 25+ years.

And all that tells me is that you were stupid enough to join.

It's almost as stupid as COMALite suggesting the exclusivity is somehow better.

GhostFish:My parents were throwing a big Christmas party one year, invited lots of people and friends of friends and so on.One guy showed up at the door and asked, "Is this the Mensa meeting?"My parents thought he was joking and played along.

Poor guy didn't realize he was at the wrong place until much, much later in the evening.

So I'm kind of left with my doubts about Mensa.

Well thank your lucky stars this guy didn't show up at your parent's door...

Zon:clyph: COMALite J: Mensa ― where you have to be smart enough to score reasonably high on an I.Q. test, yet stupid enough to plunk down annual dues for little more than what basically amounts to bragging rights.

THIS. Got in at 16. Stopped paying dues at 18. Never gone back in 25+ years.

And all that tells me is that you were stupid enough to join.

It's almost as stupid as COMALite suggesting the exclusivity is somehow better.

In terms of bragging rights (the main ‶benefit′′ of joining Mensa), it is. It′s kinda the point of bragging rights, in fact.

At 12 years of age I was still stamp collecting and haphazardly gluing model aeroplanes together. I was bookish and was considered one of the smart ones amongst my peers. Six years later when I reached university, I had dropped to being a solid B student, coasting along when I could. Things change. I hope this girl lives up to her potential, but it's not the worst thing in the world if she ends up focusing on other stuff.

FishyFred:IQ scores are skewed in the early years because, if I'm not mistaken, age is factored in.

Well, not in theory, at least. I wouldn't say so much that they're skewed as potentially less accurate.

Originally, IQ was supposed to be the ratio of a person's "mental age" to their "chronological age," so if Johnny was only 10 years old but could think and reason about as well as the average 14-year-old, he had an IQ score of 140 (14/10*100). But people quickly realized that that definition got very silly once a person reached adulthood. Would a twenty-year old who had the "mental age" of a 40-year-old have an IQ score of 200? And what does 'the "mental age" of a 40-year-old' even mean? We don't percieve the average 40-year-old to be "twice as smart as" the average 20-year-old the same way we perceive the average 14-year-old to be "twice as smart as" the average 7-year-old. Intelligence just doesn't progress that linearly.

So they gave up on "mental age" and redefined the IQ score as a measure of deviation from the mean intelligence, given the principle that intelligence is normally distributed (like a bell curve).

So a person with an IQ score of 115 is one standard deviation above the average for their age group, a person with a score of 130 is two standard deviations above. It is supposed to be adjusted for age group so that someone who has an IQ of 120 when they're 13 will still have an IQ of 120 when they're 33 (baring unforseen events such as brain damage, disease, injury, etc).

In theory, then, IQ scores are not skewed in the early years precisely because age is factored in. The system is designed such that, if everything works correctly and it's accurate and it's precise, your IQ is the same forever. But that only works because you're not so much measuring what the kids' IQ really is NOW so much as PREDICTING what it will be in adulthood, which adds another measure of uncertainty to the process.

(It's a little bit like issuing a speeding ticket based on a radar measurement of what your speed was 3 miles back and assuming that you didn't hit the brakes or stomp on the accelerator since then.)

I'm not sure that "skewed" is the right word for it, though, because that suggests a bias in one particular direction and I think it's more like imprecision.